ION's Big Year! GNSS 2012 Plus a New Pacific Rim Conference

It's a big year for the Institute of Navigation, with the venerable ION GNSS 2012 happening this September in Nashville and the new and highly anticipated Pacific PNT conference opening for the first time next April in Honolulu.

ION GNSS 2012, the granddaddy of all GNSS events, begins shortly in Music City, USA: Nashville, Tennessee.

It's scheduled during the third week of September at the downtown Nashville Convention Center, a five minute walk to the Country Music Hall of Fame and other attractions.

U.S. Officials Explore Use of the EU's Galileo Secure Civil Signal

The United States and the European Union are talking about how U.S. agencies might use the secure signal planned for Galileo to better fulfill their various responsibilities.

Applanix Launches New Airborne Photogrammetric Mapping System

Applanix introduced a new position and orientation system and flight management system (FMS) for airborne mapping today (August 27, 2012) at the International Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) 2012 Conference in Melbourne, Australia.

GNSS Hotspots

1. PAPER CUTS
Washington, Oklahoma, Ohio, Georgia, Pennsylvania
√ State transportation departments in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, and Ohio are printing fewer state highway maps, says the Associated Press. Washington did away with them entirely. Blame it on the double whammy of public sector budget cuts and smartphone, handheld, and in-car GPS. But there are lots of holdouts. As one Indiana man said, without a paper map, “You’re beholden to the GPS lady, you know?”

Next Galileo Satellite Reaches French Guiana Launch Facility; EGNOS Expands Services

A third Galileo in-orbit validation (IOV) satellite reached its launch site in French Guiana today (August 7, 2012), where it will undergo preparations for a launch in October.
The spacecraft along with the fourth and final IOV satellite (yet to shipped) will be launched aboard a Soyuz ST-B rocket, joining the first two Galileo satellites placed in orbit last year.

Interference & Jamming

The threats just keep growing to a resource that hundreds of millions of people around the world have come to rely on for a myriad purposes.

GNSS is, after all, an RF technology, vulnerable in its own way to the kind of disruptive effects that turn an AM radio into a static-ridden howl as you drive under a powerline. And the radiated energy of signals arriving with from satellite sources tens of thousands of miles away are orders of magnitude weaker than those carrying the top 40 tunes broadcast by a local station.